


odds and ends

by potted_music



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Phone Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-05-31 03:48:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19417864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: Ficlets and snippets previously posted on tumblr.Ficlet 1: in which Valery and Ulana have comradely phone sex to save millions of lives while Boris listens.Ficlet 2: young!Shcherbina/Charkov set during the Winter WarFiclet 3: Valoris, Valery finds out that Boris had to pay for Charkov's cooperation with sex, warning: dub con, rated matureFiclet 4: A sequel tothe Winter War-era young!Boris/young!CharkovFiclet 5: a pointless drabble about Boris’s morning routine, pre-ValorisUPDATED 10/11: Ficlet 6: Boris Shcherbina and Alexey Legasov listen to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 after Valery's suicide





	1. Valery/Ulana phone sex, pre-slash Valoris implied

Afterwards they don’t even remember who came up with this hare-brained scheme. Boris would bet good money it was Ulana: sounds like something only Ulana would do, so outrageously audacious that reality wouldn’t have a choice but to bend to her will (“if you arrest me, you should take me to the highest authority”). In fact, it was Boris who suggested the plan, not that that changes anything. Their manpower is significant but not unlimited, Boris said. Once they realize that the conversation is outrageous, but neither useful nor related to work, they probably would stop listening and switch to other targets.

There is a problem though (more than one, really, but some are more pressing than others).

“I cannot. If they hear me, they will definitely record it for future use,” Boris says. “I’m married.”

Ulana rolls her eyes. “So am I.”

“Yes, but you are insignificant.”

“Why thank you, Boris Evdokimovich,” she says, venom in her voice.

Valery barges in before they have a chance to complicate the matters further.

“I can do it.”

Boris throws his head back and laughs. Valery should probably be offended that his hypothetical ability to conduct comradely phone sex for the sake of saving millions of lives is cause for such mirth, but he has misplaced his ability to be offended on one of the flights from Pripyat to Moscow and back.

Which is how they land in their current predicament: Valery and Boris are in Chernobyl, Ulana’s scouring the archives in Moscow, and they need to discuss their findings. The phones, of course, are bugged.

Ulana picks up the phone in her hotel room after the first ring.

“It’s Valery,” Valery says, lighting up a cigarette, and then glances up at Boris. “I missed you. I need you.”

Their arranged code phrase is met with a soft sigh on the other end of the line.

“It’s late,” Valery presses on. “Are you getting ready for bed? Are you dressed?”

This is going to be a disaster, Boris belatedly realizes. Maybe he should bang the door, pretend to walk in and put an end to this madness. But before he goes through with this plan, Ulana lets out a throaty laugh.

“Do you want me to be?”

A moment’s pause as Valery rearranges the ashtray, his cigarette pack and a lighter on the table.

“Yes. And you are wearing your shoes, the ones with kitty heels.”

“Are you dressed?” And Boris can hear a smile in Ulana’s voice even over the static.

Some hesitation.

“No.”

“Right,” Ulana says, stretching out the syllable into something almost singsong.

Valery fidgets nervously with the phone cord, allowing his hands not a moment’s rest, tugging and pulling until Boris grows scared that they’ll have to get a new phone yet again. He reaches across the table and gently unclenches Valery’s grip on the cord. Valery’s hand is cold and clammy. Lately, he’s always cold, despite the oppressive summer heat. Boris should make sure they send the man warmer fatigues.

Boris is not quite sure what’s the etiquette for listening in on his colleagues having fake but enthusiastic phone sex. Initially he tries to tune it out with polite disinterest, the way he would feign not to hear his secretary discuss with the other girls in the office her husband’s repeated infidelities. It’s not like he needs to know that apparently Valery imagines kissing Ulana’s ankles; not like he needs to imagine Ulana press Valery flat on the bed with one heel planted firmly in the center of his chest, where his skin is pale and bruises easily. He tries to be appreciative of how well they work together, bouncing ideas off one another (Valera tugging at the belt of her trench coat, she using the belt to tie his hands to the headboards). Their cooperation might save Europe yet, but there’s no use pretending that there isn’t something dark and bitter twisting in Boris’s chest at the idea that there is a part of their lives that he’s not privy to, and cannot control.

At some stage, Valery starts to twist the phone cord again, but then remembers himself, casts Boris an apologetic glance, and pulls out a small notebook out of his breast pocket to doodle.

“Are you embarrassed to be so hard already? Like a schoolboy,” Ulana whispers, the taunting words belied by the soft tone.

“No. Not if it’s you.” And there’s utter, painful honesty in Valery’s tone, in his eyes too when he looks up briefly at Boris before taking up doodling again. In Boris’s book, nobody can be this open and vulnerable and live; he wants to smack Valery to wipe that look off his face, because Boris won’t always be there to shield him, and you cannot be that open with your feelings, ever. “Untie me.”

“Not yet,” Ulana chuckles. “I slide down and rub your cock between my boobs. You don’t need your hands to appreciate the view.”

“Oh,” Valery says, exhaling a small cloud of cigarette smoke. “You have beautiful breasts, soft, generous, with lines and veins like marble, and when my cock disappears between-” The pause is because he licks the pencil he’s doodling with, but it sounds obscene. “Please let me come.”

“Not yet.”

“At least untie me now.” His voice breaks on a plaintive note. Boris would have given him anything, and Ulana finally takes mercy.

“And the magic word?”

“Please.”

“Alright.”

“My hands freed, I grab your thighs and pull you to squat over my face.”

He should really leave now, Boris thinks. Take a cold shower. Scrub his mind and never think of it again. But they have business to discuss, and meanwhile, Ulana picks up enthusiastically,

“I rub over you, the harder press of your nose, the too soft teasing kiss of your open lips, the scratch of the stubble on your chin that’s barely this side of painful.”

“God,” Valery breathes out.

Boris carefully rearranges his trench coat on his lap, inconspicuously, he hopes.

“Are you touching yourself?” she asks.

“Yes.” Boris has to blink, because if he didn’t see Valery – one hand holding a cigarette, another doodling something – he’d have sworn the man was telling the truth from the raw vulnerable emotion in his deep voice.

“You are so open for me,” Valery says, lighting a new cigarette and glancing at Boris through the haze of smoke.

“Seven minutes,” Boris says, hoping that nobody would notice how hoarse his voice sounds (they do). “I think they stopped listening.”

“Right,” Valery says, not a trace of raspiness left his voice. “So did you find out about the control rods? I think there was a report from ’77 or thereabouts-”

And in a split second, Valery and Ulana are all business, discussing the technical details that have Boris out of his depth by sentence two, all playfulness gone. Still working together well, but not a hint of anything other than colleagues passionate about their work. Boris shakes his head in disbelief.

So Valery can lie after all, just not in the ways that matter. What else he might be hiding?

“So, you and Ulana-“ Boris says after the phone call is over. Valery lifts an eyebrow. “You two-” Despite himself, Boris makes a lewd gesture to denote fucking.

Valery laughs until there are tears in his eyes. “No! She’s a very good friend.”

“But you two were so-“

Cautiously, Valery pats him on the shoulder.

“So were you, to the sound of our voices. Bodies react the way they want to react, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Don’t worry about it.”

Boris is so bewildered that he doesn’t immediately notice that Valery has left his notebook behind. He locks the door and flips through it, looking for today’s doodles.

Boris assumed formula, assumed Ulana. What he sees makes him pause, close the notebook, then flip it open again with shaking hands.

It’s his own portrait, mouth half-open, eyes heavy-lidded. Delicate shading at the brow suggesting perspiration. More open than he ever wants to be. Softer too. He’s tough, or else he wouldn’t have got this far. Tough to like too, not that that ever bothered him. He looks at the certain lines, heart pounding in his chest. Is that what Valery sees when he looks at him? Is that how Valery sees him?

Well damn.


	2. young!Shcherbina/Charkov set during the Winter War

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: quotes from Soviet propaganda, implied but non-graphic wartime sexual violence (not by any of the protagonists), and yes, that song quoted there is [a real song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRZrH6gdpyQ), and I swear this ode to imperialist conquest shrouded in thinly veiled sexual metaphors doesn’t sound any better in the context.

The thing is, it never even occurred to him that it might be illegal. Immoral, yes. Reprehensible, yes. Not to be talked about, certainly. But not illegal. And so one second he's bent over the table, hissing from the unfamiliar thrusting pressure inside, Mark’s chest pressed to his back, a hand tangled in his hair, and the next, there are unpleasant conversations with the dorms supervisor, and the dean (the new one: the previous one was shot last year), and the rector (ditto), and then his father comes to pick him up and dispense bribes, and then they are home, and there's his father's belt (Boris lets him land three blows just for old time's sake before gently taking the belt out of his hands), and his mother's tears, and hushed conversations between his parents late at night.

"It's your fault he's like this. You always pampered him. And talked to him in that language of yours."

"I don't have any other sons," his mother says with unfamiliar steel in her voice.

"Well, and see where that got him."

Two days later, father brings him the draft leaflet. 

“This will make a man of you. If you show your worth, it might even clear your record.”

He scans the leaflet without much interest: workers of Finland, rise up against plutocracy and foreign imperialists. Not being a worker of Finland, he doesn’t see what foreign imperialists have to do with him.

More whispered conversations between his parents.

"Better a son who's alive than a dead hero," his mother pleads.

"Better a son who's a dead hero than this."

Of course, he enlists.  
*  
Actually, the war's not that bad. He takes to it like fish to water. They barely see any action, really, unless you count that one time they got lost in the woods and their lieutenant lost half his foot to frostbite (pines: 1; the Red Army: 0), or that one time Ivanko, a fellow Ukrainian, went to a village to reconnoiter, and they later found his body out in the square, bayonet wounds like hungry red mouths opening all over his body (how hungry they were all the time, how cold) (but that was Ivanko’s fault, really, no need to have got caught), or that one time they got themselves surrounded in this grove, and their jumpy first lieutenant (the new one, not the one half a foot short) decided to kill them all with his grenade, because better die like heroes than surrender, but Boris shot him first, and then they fought their way out without much fuss, so yes, he’s got some stories, but mostly the war's easy sailing. It's that last one, the one with the first lieutenant, that brings Boris in contact with Charkov.

Boris is recalled to a small command encampment further from the front line, and asked to wait in a flimsy tent. Nobody’s bothering to handcuff him, but then, the temperature has recently dropped to the unlikely -45, making him sluggish and indifferent; he wouldn’t run anyway. The mobile stove barely licks a small pocket of warmer air in the cold stillness. He winces when the tent flap is drawn aside, letting in a new gust of biting wind, and stills with his hands held several centimeters away from the stove not to lash out at the man who comes in. He’ll catch his death here, sure as he lives, unless, that is, death catches him first. 

“Private Shcherbina,” says a soft voice behind him, and it’s only then that Boris finally turns around. Death has taken the form of a short, bespectacled, pleasantly nondescript man, barely older than Boris himself, which tells you all you need to know about how serious the commanders are about enforcing order here. (Well, not death in general, but his death, most certainly.)

The man doesn’t volunteer his name, just drags an empty crate closer to the stove and sits down. After the silence has had the chance to stretch uncomfortably, the man sighs and says,

“So, I hear you killed your lieutenant.”

Killing the bastard almost certainly meant saving at least eight men he would have taken out in his quest for pointless martyrdom, but Boris is not yet altruistic enough to rejoice in the fact that their lives would be his only legacy.

“He wanted us to die as martyrs,” Boris says, anger that he believed had been long frozen out of him coming to a boil again. When that fails to elicit a reaction, he adds, “Who’ll help the workers of Finland if we are all dead?”

The man waves the bullshit aside, his hand dropping like the blade of a guillotine.

“Maybe you wanted to surrender, huh? You’ve seen those leaflets, right? The one that say, kill your commanding officers, the POW camps in Finland offer good living conditions?” Boris has seen the leaflets, yes; they all have. Before he can decide if lying and feigning ignorance would be somehow more incriminating than telling the truth, the man speaks up again, “No need to answer, we found one in your kit.”

Not that Boris expected to outlive this conversation by much in any case, but this is the death knell alright, he knows one when he hears one. And the stupid thing is, he kept the damn leaflet for the silliest of reasons: he liked the picture. Next to the promises (empty, he’s certain) of a good life in a POW camp, where no belly is ever left empty, there was a picture of a supine man leaning back on his elbow, a cigar in his mouth, long deft fingers covering the lower part of his face, peering at the camera out of the corner of his eyes. It was nice, thinking about a future that might contain some of that, but now his proclivities have landed him in trouble for the second time. He reaches into his pocket for a cigarette, but his fingers are too frozen to strike a match.  


“You are trembling,” the man seated in front of him says without much interest.

“It’s the cold,” Boris says. “Could you light one for me?”

They don’t refuse a condemned man his last cigarette, of that he’s certain.

“Of course it is,” the man purrs, confidently striking a match.

*  
His bewilderment doesn’t let up throughout the next week. Yes, he had promised to report, but who doesn’t report; yes, he doesn’t expect a commendation (a death sentence is what he expected); and just like that, he’s let go. He rejoices in being alive, even in long marches across deep ravines where the treacherous snow sometimes caves under you; even in their stale rations; even in shitting in this weather and wiping his arse with the snow, because they ran out of newspapers several weeks ago. Then, of course, they get lost in the woods again and start joking about who’ll have to serve as their meat rations, so there’s not much rejoicing after that, but the first week after what was supposed to be his last day on this damn earth was the best week of his life.

The war's been over for more than a week before they find out about it. That same man finds their unit to bring the news, and that’s when Boris finally finds out his name: Maxim Charkov. 

At first, of course, they glimpse him from a distance, take him for a Finnish spy and almost shoot him, despite no Finnish spy they ever saw being that stiff on his skis. Luckily, Boris peers into the binoculars and recognizes him, waving the sharpshooter down just in time.

“Comrades,” the man says softly as their unit lines up on the edge of a snow field, “the goals of the Soviet government have been achieved. You’ve helped to liberate the small but noble Finnish people from the yoke of its butchers. The war is over. Let’s welcome the victory of the peasants and workers of Finland with a hurray!”

Boris is not sure what burned villages and dead bodies in the woods have to do with the victory of peasants and workers, but decides to keep his doubts to himself.

“Hurray,” they shout, sinking ankles deep into the slush: the weather has turned recently.

“Hurray,” the man repeats, raising his hands.

“Hurray,” their voices ring out under ashen skies.

Most importantly, Charkov brought them cigarettes.  
*  
Charkov breathes hard, unused to long ski marches. Boris stays by him out of the sense of misplaced duty, and they fall slightly behind the group as they head back towards civilization.

“It’s a good thing you were lost in the woods like that,” Charkov says, ducking clumsily under a low-hanging branch of a tree. “The boys who were closer to villages went a little over the top in their celebrations.”

From the main group, the wind carries back snatches of the song that has been on all the radios before the war even began. “Receive us, the Beauty Suomi. Open the halves of your wide gates for us.”

“That sort of thing,” Charkov nods.

Boris holds the next low branch aside for him, letting him pass. “And you didn’t stop them?”

“I don’t think anybody could,” Charkov says, laboriously moving his skis. “That’s what we fed them, after all. And besides, guilt is good. Guilt means you are one of us.”

“But you didn’t come with them,” Boris says, even if he doesn’t quite know why he’s hoping for a negative. The man saved him, so maybe he’d like to be grateful to him without imagining the people to whom he was less kind.

“No,” a hint of outrage in his voice, or maybe that’s just Charkov breathing hard with exertion. “I spit at what they did, but everybody’s guilty of something. What you are is defined by what you have suffered, and by what you are guilty of.”

Personally, Boris thinks that that’s a load of crap. You are defined by what you do, not by what’s done to you, and not by your basest urges either, but he’s not in the mood to argue.  
*  
“Come with me,” Charkov says after they reach the village. “I have a whole house requisitioned just for myself.”

It’s more of a hut than a house, but who’s Boris to argue. There’s vodka too, and a neat array of glasses. Charkov wastes time and precious thawed water to rinse one glass for himself (twice), while Boris just wipes one with his dirty sleeve.

“You never know who drank from them before,” Charkov explains smugly.

“I don’t think being a White Finn is contagious,” Boris ventures, finally thawed out enough to risk cracking a joke.

“No, but plenty of other things are. Well, your health.” Charkov pours them a measly half a finger’s worth of vodka: he’s either cautious, or pacing himself for a long night of drinking. After they down their shots, Charkov says, “I have to choose whom to court-martial come morning. For what they did after the victory. We’ll have to hang two men, maybe three, to teach the others a lesson. Probably not more though.”

Boris feels a shiver run down his spine. It’s the cold, he thinks, nothing but the damn cold. “You said yourself that that’s what they’ve been taught.”

Charkov’s voice is very tired and very matter-of-fact when he explains, “Well, yes, but there are always germs that can poison the entire healthy organism. And if others believe that the germs have been eliminated, they can go back to their mothers and sisters and girlfriends as if none of this happened. They are not the guilty ones, after all, because the guilty ones are dead.”

After that, they fall silent. Charkov lights a fire, and soon the house is warm enough to drop their winter coats. Say what you will about the Finns, but they do know how to build for the weather. 

They drink mindlessly and stubbornly, without saying much. It’s past midnight when Charkov (“call me Maxim Sergeyevich,” the prick) smells the air (or sniffles, there’s no telling when the entire war has been one never-ending cold), and says,

"There will be a war."

"There's always a war. We are barely back from the war."

"A big war," Charkov insists, leaning closer. “With the Germans.”

"But wasn’t there something in the newspapers- Aren't they our allies?"

"Not for long,” Charkov says somberly, then hiccups, ruining the effect. "So go back to Kharkiv, finish your studies. We'll need qualified people for the reconstruction efforts.”

Boris leans his head, wonders what is it like to be Charkov, a man who sees charred earth underneath peaceful cities, who senses death lurking on the rim of an unwashed glass.

“I cannot go back to finish my studies,” he says, “there were complications.”

“Yes you can. I know about your problem, and I talked to the right people. Go back to Kharkiv, nobody’ll cause you any trouble. And I'll need people I can trust."

The pompous tone makes Boris laugh. “You are a nobody.”

“Yes, but not for long,” Charkov says, at least having the decency not to be offended.

"Why do you think you can trust me?"

"Oh, because we are what we are guilty of. Because of this."

Charkov doesn’t kiss him, but presses his clean-shaved cheek to Boris’s stubble, his hand working at Boris’s belt.

Boris is almost too drunk to get it up, but miracles do happen, and they’ve been long overdue a miracle after this miserable winter war. Afterwards, Charkov scrubs his hands clean with snow until they are raw and red. It’s only in the morning, when Charkov leaves to hand out death sentences, that it occurs to Boris to wonder if Charkov wanted this the same way he did, not as a tactical move but as a physical thing. It happens more times over the years (in the bombed-out Kharkiv after the liberation, in Tyumen, then in Moscow), when Charkov needs no further guarantees of his loyalty, but Boris never gets a clearer answer.


	3. Valoris, Valery finds out that Boris had to pay for Charkov's cooperation with sex, warning: dub con, rated mature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on a [Chernobyl kink meme prompt](https://chernobyl-hbo-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/794.html?thread=22554#cmt22554): _Boris managed to give Valery everything he asked for. But would Valery react if he learned that Boris had to be abused, prostituted or humiliated by some party men to provide him the supplies?_
> 
> Warning: dub con.  
> Rating: mature.

Things that Valery wishes he did not know, in no particular order: that he's a coward; that his silence, too, is a part of the sweeping conspiracy of untruths from which this all came, the gutted reactor, cities hastily abandoned, death settling on the ground with dust; that he now has blood on his hands, and will have substantially more as long-term health consequences begin to manifest in more and more people who came through the exclusion zone; that Boris, his anchor and rock through all this, is getting close and cozy with the KGB, quite literally. There's an envelope on Valery’s desk: blurred pictures, probably taken with a hidden camera, but clear enough to tell the story. Boris bent over a desk, his trousers barely pushed down his hips, Charkov behind him. Their fingers intertwined, Boris' wrists pressed to the table, his teeth bared. Eyebrows drawn, sweat beading on his forehead, his strong back arched as he’s pushing into thrusts.

The worst thing is, Valery recognizes this suit, this tie, he doesn’t even need timestamps to know when the pictures were taken, and he mentally curses himself for letting himself become so aware of Boris, cataloguing his expressions and movements, Valery’s eyes always darting to Boris first whenever he enters a room, reading his posture, taking comfort in his towering frame. Boris pretended that he’d shield their team of scientists from the worst of it, and all the while, he was with the KGB (well, with Charkov, Valery amends, even if he’s not sure there’s much of a difference).

Was this before or after Boris said that he was doing everything he could to get Ulana out of prison? Is this how he even knew Ulana got arrested, Charkov confiding in him in a moment of postcoital softness? Was it a private joke between them then, that moment when Boris stood up during the briefing and said, "We hope we have lived up to the highest standards of the KGB," and Charkov smiled and said, "You have. Of course you have"?

Who brought the pictures here though? Did Valery have an unknown friend in high places, warning him that nobody was to be trusted? Who would even have the right clearance to obtain pictures this revealing? Valery takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm, wishing he could turn back time, walk into his hotel room and find no envelopes that would disturb his peace of mind, shaky as it is.

Oh, and one more thing Valery wishes he didn't know: the images make him impossibly hard. Of course he knows he’s attracted to Boris; he has a long catalogue of snatched memories: the smell of his aftershave as Boris leaned too close to him during breakfast, Boris’ rough grip on his arm when he pulled him out of the way of a military vehicle skidding on gravel, Boris’ slightly hesitant smiles, as if he expected that Valery would smile in return. Mere fancies, Valery though these were, a welcome momentary diversion from the bleak horror of their surroundings. He knew anything more was impossible because Boris wasn’t like that, and now he knows it was impossible all along for a whole different reason, but his cock is slow to catch up on the idea of this impossibility. 

He pushes the pictures back into the envelope, hastily hides it at the bottom of his suitcase, and slinks back to the small en suite bathroom. He’ll not think about this, he tells himself. He’ll just rub it out mechanically, thinking about nothing at all. This has nothing to do with the stubborn desires that have been stuck at the back of his mind for weeks, or with the pictures, or with this unexpected betrayal. It’s strange though. To the extent that he allowed himself to imagine anything at all, when he was tired and sleep wouldn’t come, he imagined it would be Boris who’d press him to the wall, turn him around and push in unceremoniously. But then, the pictures.

Pulling his painfully hard cock out of his pants, Valery concedes defeat and jerks off, imagining working his fingers slowly into Boris and making room for himself inside. He closes his eyes and throws his head back, imagining it’s not his own fingers clenching around his cock but Boris, or maybe some slightly different version of Boris, the one he could trust.

*

Valery invites himself along when their driver heads out to Kyiv to pick Boris up at the airport after his latest flight to Moscow. Valery needs to buy more shirts in any case: at the rate their old clothes, too contaminated to be cleaned safely, get burned, they’ll soon become patron saints of the local textile industry. Also, damningly, he misses Boris. If he didn’t know any better, the smile Boris greets him with and the heavy pat on the shoulder would make him believe that Boris had missed him too.

As they climb into the back seat and settle for the long drive back to Pripyat, Boris' hip is touching his. With the layers of clothing, it’s not like Valery could make himself believe that he could feel any of Boris’ body heat seeping through, but he’s still painfully aware of the point of contact. He waits for Boris to move away, but he doesn't. Maybe Boris expects _him_ to move away, but he doesn't either, not that that would help. Valery is constantly aware of Boris’ body in any case, living, breathing, breathing, sucking in and soaking up radiation, making him the most dangerous person in the room twice over. Boris shouldn’t be staying here, Valery knows; had overheard Ryzhkov bluntly ask Boris about his health once, heard enough of an answer to know that much. If Valery put in enough effort, he could maybe persuade Boris to leave and find a competent replacement, but the truth is, he cannot do this without him, despite the knowledge of his betrayal. 

“Have you been to the doctor?” Valery asks without looking at Boris.

“Me? I’m strong as a bull,” Boris says with fake nonchalance Valery sees right through, and when Valery gives him a reproachful stare, adds, “He said that I could probably beat him in a fight, and he’s this 30-year-old whipper-snapper, I’ll have you know.”

This wins Boris another reproachful glance. “You don’t go to a doctor to fight him.”

“No,” Boris says, and closes his eyes, pretending to settle for a nap. 

As they get closer to the exclusion zone, civilian cars slowly disappear until all that is left is an occasional military vehicle and long stretches of silent empty roads. The guard waves them right through, and then there’s nothing but empty villages and bulldozers razing small vegetable gardens, cabbages and potatoes and some greens that Valery wouldn’t be able to recognize.

"Did you ask for more bulldozers? We'll need more bulldozers. We won't be done until the ground freezes at this rate."

Boris startles. Maybe he wasn’t pretending that he was taking a nap after all, but when Valery places a hand on his shoulder in apology, he shrugs.

“It is painful to watch, is all, all this good food going to waste.”

“It’s been exposed to- let me run the calculations, it’s been sixty days since the explosion, so-”

"I know, I know.” Boris looks away, and his body shifts so that now his shoulder is lodged against Valery’s. “You've never gone hungry, have you."

Have you? Valery wants to ask, but he’s distracted by the sight. When Boris turns to face the window, an edge of a fresh bruise becomes visible under a perfectly ironed collar of his shirt. Is that a love bite? Valery wonders. What else could it be? He’s been to Moscow, after all; he’s been to see his old friends. Valery can entertain himself all he wants with illusions that Boris is on his side, or that their casual touches might mean something, but Boris has a whole other life he only sees in hints and outlines of bruises.

They pass the cemetery of abandoned contaminated vehicles, lurking at the side of the road like hungry dogs with their ribs sticking out, which means that they are almost home. They go up to their rooms to change into their military fatigues, and then, as has become their habit, they slink out of the hotel as the guard changes, and soon they are in an abandoned apartment they’ve been using to discuss things they didn’t want the KGB to hear. Does that amuse Boris, this charade of secrecy kept up for one viewer, who already knows of Boris’ complicity?

“How was Moscow?” Valery asks when the door of the apartment closes behind them.

“Valera-” Boris says, and there’s something in his voice that makes Valery freeze in place, the unfamiliar brittle edge, a note of fear. Slowly, ever so slowly, giving him time to step back (as if Valery could, as if he wasn’t mesmerized by the sudden change), Boris reaches out and cups his face.

The touch breaks Valery’s reverie. He can feel his mouth twist into a grimace as he hooks his finger on Boris’ collar and pulls, revealing a bite mark. He jabs a finger right in its center, where Boris’ pulse beats frantically under his fingertip.

"Was this Charkov?"

Boris recoils, deflates visibly as shame settles on his face. “So you know.”

“Someone brought pictures to my hotel room.”

Boris curses, inspiredly and creatively. Valery would swear he’d never heard some of those words put in those particular combinations before. There are a couple of times when it seems like Boris is running out of steam, but he picks back up every time, until the tirade is cut short by a cough. Valery doesn’t like the sound of that cough, not one bit.

Finally regaining his breath, Boris says, “He didn’t have to threaten you too, not when he had me all along, the bastard. He promised he wouldn’t.”

A threat? How was that a threat? If anything, it gave Valery leverage against Charkov, the knowledge and evidence of his illegal preferences. Not that Valery’d ever use it, not when it would drag Boris down too, not when he himself shared those preferences, but still. 

Meanwhile, Boris continues, “You didn't have to promise to cooperate for him to release Ulana either. I was working on it. Why give him the two of us for the price of one?”

He didn’t see it as a threat, Valery realizes belatedly, because it was only ever about preferences for him. Charkov could see it differently. It was a threat if it was a weapon, a way to put an apparatchik with inconvenient illusions of independence in his rightful place. Words escape Valery’s mouth before he has time to think it through and consider whether he should be saying the obvious at all.

"He raped you."

There's genuine horror in Boris' eyes. 

"No! I said yes, didn't I?" Boris tries to catch his gaze, smiles his confident smile Valery has usually seen reserved for briefings with Gorbachev. "I'm not like that, nobody can force me to do anything I don't- I'm not like those men, not like in prison."

The men in prison could have said yes too, Valery thinks, or no, for that matter, and none of that would have changed anything. 

“Could you have said no though?”

As silence stretches, it suddenly hits Valery what he'd jerked off to, has been jerking off to for a while now. He barely has time to reach the small bathroom before he’s puking his guts out.

"I said yes," Boris, who trailed after him, repeats helplessly, and hands him a wad of toilet paper to wipe his mouth. "It wasn't bad, actually. I expected it'd be worse, I can understand why some like-"

Valery waits for a moment to see if nausea has passed before he speaks again. His throat burns, and not just with the vomiting.

"Please stop, you don't need to make excuses. You don't need to comfort me either. If anything-"

Boris shrugs.

"What’s done is done. There are plenty of interchangeable men like me who could step in, so I’m replaceable, but you are not. Neither’s Ulana."

“You don’t need to do that to protect us.”

“I think you’ll find that I do.”

Valery rinses his mouth for endless minutes, trying to come up with something to say to make this better, but drawing a blank.

“All better now?” Boris asks when Valery finally turns off the water, and takes his hand.

Valery looks at the fingers squeezing his with something not altogether dissimilar from horror. Before the pictures, before he found out about any of this, he would have leapt with joy at this, but as things stand, he can never know if this is what Boris wants, or if this is some way to cancel out what he was forced to do.

Unclasping Boris’ fingers, Valery says, "What he did to you doesn't make you- You don't have to do anything you don't want."

For a second, Boris seems genuinely perplexed, and then an amused smile lights up his face.

"No it doesn't. No I don't have to. No, that doesn't have anything to do with- anything. Yes I want to."

And he leans downs into a kiss.


	4. sequel to the Winter War-era young!Boris/young!Charkov

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sequel to [the Winter War-era young!Boris/young!Charkov](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19417864/chapters/46749673), written for Sleepless_Malice, who said this:  
> 

Maxim's letters sounded exactly like those frontline reports they broadcast on the radio, scanty on details, generous with triumphalist rhetoric. He once caught a broadcast that, he was certain, was Maxim's letter word for word. Maxim’s handwriting is nondescript and guarded, with none of the flourishes they teach at school, as if he were making sure that not a shred of his personality would become legible in a careless slip of the pen, a whirl a tad to expansive, a press of the pen a bit too forceful on certain words.

Damned if Boris knew why Maxim would send him this drivel. Maybe he just wanted Boris to know that he was still alive, wherever he was, which raised a whole host of other questions. Why did he think that Boris needed to know? Was it a reminder about the favors he’d call in, in the unimaginable future after the war that seemed a little bit more tenuous with each passing day? Hell, maybe the man just wanted to think that someone cared if he was alive or not, but why choose Boris for the role? Boris doesn't know how Maxim managed to track down his address when he was evacuated to Tashkent, but the letters found him every time: in the institute’s dorms, in a tiny apartment he’d been renting with his sister and three other families, back in the dorms again. 

He's been back to Kharkiv for three weeks now, and every time he thinks he’s settling in into the new normalcy of the freshly liberated city, another piece of news manages to knock the ground from under his feet. Remember the cook in the institute's diner, the one who always had an extra scrap for hungry students? Slept with a Nazi officer, was hanged for it, but not before our boys from the Red Army had a bit of fun with her too. Remember the dean (the one who threatened Boris with several unpleasant years in the camps)? Penned articles for Nazi newspapers, was shot for it; no, he retreated with the Nazis and escaped to the west; no, he was on that train that got bombed from the air, may he rest in peace, because you don’t badmouth the dead, even if they were right bastards.

The dead are not yet buried, or at least not all of them, and the state is already demanding to be fed. They organize the state loan to support the war effort, and when Boris isn't penning touching testimony about the heroic, if wholly fictional elderly who shell out improbable thousands of rubles to buy a tank in honor of their sons, the dead war heroes, he's towering over workers unwilling to chip in. 

He had written "People live here" on the door of the apartment he’s staying in, even if he doesn’t feel like a people a lot of the time: he’s a pen, a pair of helping hands, a function. The building’s not too badly damaged, they might even get water running once the pipes down the road get repaired, but it’s not too much trouble to run down the stairs to the well in the courtyard in the meantime. The door doesn’t lock properly, but it’s not like he has much that could tempt a thief.

He almost admires the optimism of the looters when he hears someone try the door handle late one evening. That’s something you don’t see often these days, the optimism, but then, he’s heard enough stories about looters killing the residents of apartments they thought were abandoned, heard of looters _eating_ the owners during hungry winters, so his admiration is short-lived. An army-issue TT-30 he bought from a one-legged war veteran for 8 days' worth of bread rations is always at his bedside table, so he grabs it before walking cautiously to the door. 

"Scarper, or I'll shoot."

There’s a chuckle from behind the door, and then a familiar voice says, "What is it with you shooting senior officers?"

And there he is, dressed in civilian clothing, leaner and shabbier, which makes him as invisible and unremarkable as ever, a living integer of the grimy city and its shuffling people, so of a piece with the place that that almost makes him remarkable again. Boris considers hugging him, but then just steps to the side to let him in.

"Are you a senior officer now?”

"Maybe," Maxim says with a smug little smile that disappears in a split second, as if he found the human expression too incriminating. "I've read your article about the state loan. Remarkable stuff. I thought I'd drop by."

To hell with it, Boris thinks, and does pull him into a hug, and under the bulky coat, he’s all angles and tense muscles, Maxim is. Something in his backpack clinks at the motion.

“I brought you treats,” Maxim says, disentangling himself from the hug, and heads for the kitchen. Boris fumbles with the matches and lights a candle just in time to see Maxim put a can of meat on the table. He squints at the label in the flickering light, then wrinkles his nose.

"This cow died before the war."

"Lucky her," Maxim says, putting half a loaf of bread next to it.

“And it was German too.”

“Lucky us. You cannot get better canned meat than German meat for love or money.”

Then follows a small bottle of cognac, and a handful of sugar wrapped in a clean cloth (Boris presses a finger to the parcel to pick up stray grains and licks it clean), and a small can of Vaseline. Boris raises an eyebrow.

“Are you buying my company for the evening for the price of a dinner?”

Maxim casts an appreciative glance at the measly still life arranged on the table. “You wouldn’t be so offended if you knew how hard it was to get the cognac.”

Boris takes a closer look. The cognac isn’t good, it’s cheap stuff in pre-war terms, now worth its price in gold. He tilts his head with an amused grin. “No, actually, I’m offended that you imply that I’d need to be paid for this.”

And the truth is, he hasn’t been with anyone since Maxim, since Finland, well, unless you count that Uzbek guy he sucked off in a back alley Tashkent; or that time he rubbed it out with a disoriented freshman who hasn’t been outside his home town before evacuation, and was overwhelmed with all the new impressions; or- well, that’s not the point, none of it, and the point is, he hasn’t been with anybody _twice_ since then, and even more pertinently, while it would be an overstatement to say that he missed Maxim, the times before the war–this war, the great war–have acquired a certain idealized glow, even his wretched little war that came before, not quite a part of this great one, and so did their little interlude in a cabin on the outskirts of a half-burnt-out village. So no, he’s not offended by the innuendo, just surprised: he has accepted, back in Finland, that buggery won’t happen. He had suggested it exactly once back then, but Maxim blanched. Maybe Boris shouldn’t push his luck by reminding Maxim about his earlier principles, but he’s not exactly known for being cautious, is he now, so he chortles and asks,

"So you no longer mind, and I quote, poking your penis in shit?"

Maxim’s face, in the moment before he schools his expression back into one of studied neutrality, is all the answer he needs: Maxim does mind, which makes the Vaseline all the more inexplicable.

Maxim takes another look at the food, and picks up the Vaseline. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he reluctantly concedes. “Are you hungry? Because unless you are starving, I’d rather we went to bed. I want you to do it.”

“Just admit you missed me,” Boris says, feeling suddenly lightheaded.

Maxim shakes his head in disbelief, and walks through the dark corridor to the small bedroom with the confidence that makes Boris wonder if he’s been here before, sneaking in while Boris was away, or maybe that’s just the background paranoia Maxim is so good at fomenting.

“How was it?” Boris asks, trailing after him. “The war, I mean.”

Maxim doesn’t look back. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“How was it for _you_?”

“It’s not _was_ , it _is_.” Maxim says, beginning to undress, despite the chill of the room that stood abandoned for so long that Boris never managed to warm it. “And I’m an inconsequential person, therefore my experience need not concern you. Just read the papers, why don’t you.”

“Dumb, is what you are,” Boris says, and kisses his pale shoulder.

It’s funny how these things go: smells are the first thing you forget, afterwards, and you can never recall them except in inadequate words that never measure up to reality. Boris remembers the hut in Finland, remembers the vodka and the fire in the stove, so this is what Maxim must have smelled like: the smoke, the spirits. He must have smelled of fear too: the fear of those he condemned to death, and his own fear too, always aware that the tables could turn fast. But now, with Boris’ nose pressed to his skin, the familiar human smell deep in the shell of the house that still reeks of blood and empty forgotten spaces manages, if only for a split second, to drive away the lurking fears.

“Bed” might be too strong a word for a makeshift frame Boris has cobbled together from old planks, but they’ve both slept on worse, of that he’s sure. He maps Maxim’s skin with his lips: the goose bumps on the backs of his arms, a scar on his ribs that looks like a bullet graze, the sparse hairs on his chest, his small nipples getting more pronounced under Boris’ lips, a scar on his forearm that must have been a nasty burn when it was fresh. Boris knows not to ask questions.

He remembers Maxim as a sliver of a young man, a little rat vested with too much authority; he’s different now, sinewy, tougher, muscles standing out against his frame. He bucks up when Boris takes his cock in his mouth, making Boris choke and press a warning palm to his stomach to hold him in place.

Whatever Maxim has been thinking of in the desolate landscapes of his wartime travels, reality, it seems, fails to live up to his expectations. No matter how much Vaseline Boris slathers on his fingers, Maxim clenches at the touch. “Tense up, then breathe out and relax,” Boris whispers, kissing his thigh, and manages to get a finger in. The thighs bracketing him tremble with the effort. “What am I doing wrong?” Boris asks, feeling inadequate, which makes Maxim tense even more. The muscles around his finger are so tight that, Boris thinks, if he wanted to get his dick jammed in a door, there were easier ways to get that experience than trying this. 

“It’s okay, it happens,” he says, moving to pull out his finger. 

“Don’t stop,” Maxim says, covering his soft cock with his palm. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Leaving to where?”

“Well, the frontline has moved, and I move with it. So don’t stop.”

Boris knew men who were in a rush to say goodbye like that, finish their ration of coffee just in case they never got to drink it afterwards, send the last sentimental letters to the girls they didn’t quite remember. Those were usually the ones that didn’t make it back. The thought kills whatever was left of the mood for good, so he sits up, ignoring both the creaking of the bed and Maxim’s protesting noise.

“Come on, I’ll heat up some water. You’ll wash up, and then we’ll try to get some sleep.”

"No need to waste the firewood,” Maxim says petulantly. “Lukewarm water would suffice."

"You can play a strong man elsewhere."

Boris watches him wash up, trying not to imagine these ribs, these shoulder blades, these flat buttocks rot in an unmarked grave. Will he even find out if Maxim got killed? Of course he will, he tries to comfort himself: Maxim seems just the type to have made arrangements for all eventualities.

Maxim eyes the towel Boris hands him with barely concealed skepticism, but eventually it passes his inspection. Drying himself vigorously, he says,

"Of course, you'll need to get married."

At first, Boris believes that he has misheard. "What?” 

“Svitlana, the secretary of your district committee, seems like a steady sort of woman. A good career too, for a woman her age. Think about it.”

Boris steps closer to Maxim to catch his gaze. “Are you mad? If it's about this, then don't sweat it, it's life."

Maxim rolls his eyes, and it’s the most lively expression Boris has ever seen on him. "Of course it’s not about this. It’s about your career. How many high-ranking officials do you know who aren't married?"

Boris is not in the habit of keeping track of high-ranking officials, so he just shrugs noncommittally, and asks, "Are you getting married then?"

Maxim spreads his hands. "I had a girl in the partisan unit. The Nazis killed her, and I'm still grieving."

"Is that true?"

Maxim shrugs. "There are many stories like that."

Which, Boris doesn’t fail to notice, isn’t an answer, not that he’s holding his breath for a straightforward answer in any case. Deciding to approach it from a different angle, he asks, "Is that what you did? Were you with the partisans?"

"Maybe."

"Were you behind the enemy lines?"

“Maybe, maybe not. Come to bed."

Settling against his side, Maxim finally relaxes. For a while, they lie in silence, listening as their breathing rustles against the vast quiet of the city. Eventually Maxim shifts, reaching to cup Boris’ cock.

“But I’m not fetching more water,” Boris warns hastily.

"I’ll do it,” Maxim says, as if he’ll ever find the well amid piles of rubble, and adds, “Let’s try something else. That's what Greeks did, apparently."

“You’ve been to Greece?”

“No silly, the Ancient Greeks. The ones who are all dead.”

Boris thought it was the people who were supposed to know that sort of thing, the enemy class element, who were all dead, but go figure. Know your enemy, and all that.

With a sigh, Boris says, “Not because of this specifically, I hope.” 

There’s something vaguely funny about this, them huddled at the bottom of a half-dead city, Maxim coating Boris’ inner thighs with Vaseline, then breathing wetly against the back of his shoulder as his cock poked rhythmically at the back of Boris’ balls.

“What?” he asks when Boris huffs out a laugh.

“Nothing,” Boris says, turning to face him, “It’s nothing, I’m just glad you are alive.”

“Well yes, it would be odd if you were rutting with a corpse.”

Maxim even lets Boris kiss him this time, but he cannot stop laughing, so their lips barely touch, and then he presses their cocks together with one hand, puts the other on the back of Maxim’s head. Their foreheads touch.

“Please tell me,” Boris says, his hand moving furiously around their cocks, “about the war, I mean. You’ve seen my war, so it’s only fair.”

“It’s boring,” Maxim says, and then none of them say anything at all for a good long while, and then Boris does go down to get another pail of water. With a yawn that Boris can almost believe is genuine, Maxim adds, “I’m sure someone will eventually make good novels out of it.”


	5. a pointless drabble about Boris’s morning routine, pre-Valoris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1) because every Chernobyl (HBO) fan is contractually obligated to write 1 (one) drabble with a dumb physics or chemistry joke, and this is mine.
> 
> 2) I’ve read a shit ton of Sofia Parnok (a Russian lesbian poet, not very good, not a rewarding effort) for another fic, so I’m using quotes from her a lot for the foreseeable future to make up for lost time.
> 
> 3) because nobody just accidentally ends up looking as good as HBO!Boris Shcherbina, okay? there’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s this.

Boris Shcherbina loses about 30% of his volume once you pour him out of his tailored suits and into a sleeveless shirt and boxers, Valery discovers when he barges into his room one morning. Well, it’s not like Boris is a liquid to conserve volume regardless of shape, good to know, really, Valery's brain supplants helpfully, if absurdly, to distract him from the view of knobby old man's knees and thin sinewy calves. A gas, then, something that expands to take up all available space: fitting, given how he fills up all Valery's thoughts, and the site, and the hallowed corridors in high places.

"What." Shcherbina says, doing another sit-up. "You'll have to invest effort to stay fit once you get to my age too. I bet I can do more sit-ups than you even now."

Valery swallows, tearing his gaze away from Shcherbina’s muscular hands folded behind his head. "I'll never live to be your age, so the point is moot."

That finally makes Shcherbina pause and wipe a sheen of sweat off his forehead. "Have you ever considered that you might be wrong."

He could lie, he guesses; is tempted to, to ward off the blank hopeless look that settles on Shcherbina’s face whenever he’s not cautious enough, but to what purpose? Better rip it off fast, like a band-aid off a fresh scrape. "I'm not in the habit of wasting my time with pointless exercises."

Moreover, Shcherbina, it turns out, wastes enough time for the both of them, even in the face of a reminder that their time is running out. Having dressed relatively quickly, Shcherbina hums and haws in front of the mirror while Valery relays the morning reports about the state of the reactor and outlines the next couple of stages of the cleanup effort. Valery forgot to bring his hairbrush to Chernobyl and hasn’t yet decided if it makes a noticeable difference in how his hair plasters to his skull, so Shcherbina’s careful architectural efforts with his own hair seem arcane enough to be fascinating rather than irritating, at least for the first three minutes or so.

“Breakfast will go cold,” he finally notes.

“You are free to go,” Shcherbina grumbles, lightly brushing his fingertips over a stubborn strand of hair that won’t stay upright. When Valery shrugs, he finally puts down the hairbrush and turns to face him. “You know how Gorbachev is fond of saying that our power comes from the perception of our power? That’s generally true.”

Valery cannot help but laugh. “And you think your hair gives you what, an authoritative air?”

Giving him a disappointed look, Shcherbina goes into the bathroom.

“We won’t be able to decontaminate the heavy machinery, of course, so it’ll have to be buried here,” Valery goes on explaining, trailing after him.

“Will you stop hovering?” Shcherbina asks, catching his gaze in the mirror.

“And how much longer will you stay in front of this one if I don’t hover?”

“Just give me a second of privacy, why don’t you.”

“I’m not taking my chances.”

If Shcherbina believes he can glare him into obedience, he’s in for a disappointment, Valery decides, planting his feet wider. Finally Shcherbina concedes defeat and guiltily opens the cabinet. There’s something pink lurking in a glass filled with water, like a coughed-up organ. Dentures, Valery realizes with a startled laugh. He doesn’t quite know what he assumed from Shcherbina’s guilty look, but something much worse, in any case.

“There are good things about not living to this age, as you see,” Shcherbina says, an unbelievable, improbable blush tainting his cheeks. 

“I wasn’t laughing at you, and your secret dies with me,” Valery rasps through enormous protective pity stuck in his throat. “Yes, bold of me to defy all state pension plans of heaven.”

That finally makes Shcherbina smile, if briefly, which fills Valery with unfamiliar giddy pride. “State pensions plans of heaven…” Shcherbina repeats, fishing out the dentures. “That’s good, ha. Who knew you were a poet.” 

“No- well, yes, I do dabble, but that’s Sofia Parnok.”

“Never heard of her,” Shcherbina says, visibly losing interest.

No wonder, Valery thinks, but that’s somehow better than Shcherbina knowing and disapproving.

“She wasn’t very good, really. She knew Tsvetaeva though.”

In more ways than one, he doesn’t add, looking away to give Shcherbina his privacy.


	6. in which Boris Shcherbina and Alexey Legasov listen to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 after Valery's suicide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fairly pointless angsty ficlet in which Boris Shcherbina and Alexey Legasov listen to [Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 (aka the Stalingrad Symphony)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYpqi5QP9ng) after Valery’s suicide.
> 
> (the explanation for the “either the emir will be dead, or the donkey will be dead” thing is [here](https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=z7pxKnnXOxoC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=%22there+are+many+such+donkeys+in+bukhara+alone%22&source=bl&ots=dA3RNCkYIa&sig=ACfU3U35yTv6U8AHf9q4QuFWvN0kz5JXjQ&hl=uk&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwitmrmH5ZTlAhWq5aYKHZhvBzoQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22there%20are%20many%20such%20donkeys%20in%20bukhara%20alone%22&f=false).)

He barely has time to hear the first bars of the music before a fit of coughing overtakes him, which is just as well, because he has no ear for this sort of stuff, and no patience for bombastic triumphalism in descriptions of the war either.

Whoever was in charge of assigning seats in the philharmonic orchestra to members of the Council of Ministers must have been fond of Boris, since he got premium seating, smack in the middle of the second row, but now that he’s coughing, his spittle, it seems, lands right on the back of the conductor’s neck, and even trumpets, or whatever those howling things are, do little to drown out Boris’s rasping. He clambers heavily to his feet and tries to make his way to the exit through the morass of lacquered shoes, and long dresses, and foreign-made high heels, and fat round knees, and sharp knees blocking the narrow row that separates him from the merciful escape, and the orchestra’s bang-bang-bang has to cover more than a few yelps as he steps on toes. He’s halfway down the aisle before he realizes that an old man in a pearly grey suit has peeled off from the row and sneaked out after him.

Boris leaves the door of the hall open for him: maybe the old man needs a fortifying drink to put up with the music, or maybe he wants to offer support, in which case Boris would have to clock him in the jaw just to make a point, because he’s not yet at the stage where he’d accept help from the frail elderly with walking sticks, thank you very much. Well, not that he’s much older than Boris himself, but the point still stands. When the man joins him in the corridor and doesn’t hurry off to the buffet, Boris makes an effort to stand up straighter, and discreetly fumbles the handkerchief into his pocket. The man, to his credit, remains silent.

"I was there,” Boris explains after he regains his breath, then takes a pause to make sure that speaking won’t trigger another bout of coughing. “At the Siege of Stalingrad. It wasn't nearly so triumphant."

He casts a glance at the man, whom he’s certain he’d seen before. Must be someone from one of the obscure divisions of the Central Committee, maybe agriculture, maybe fomenting revolutions in small Latin American countries, one or the other. The man smirks and gestures him to a velvet-upholstered banquette.

"This isn’t triumphant either. When it was first performed, some people in the high echelons of power pilloried Shostakovich as counter-revolutionary. If you are moping over the dead instead of celebrating our triumph, the logic in the hallowed corridors went, you must be on the side of fascists.” The man’s tone is perfectly level, neither condemning nor congratulating this position, complacently accepting whatever the authorities might bring; Boris cannot help but laugh, and regrets it instantly as he doubles over in a cough. The man waits till the coughing subsides to continue. “To think that they are now performing Shostakovich here- He rethought his position, and now here we are.” 

Here we are indeed. In an empty corridor, a bloody handkerchief clutched in his hand, discussing a composer Boris cares little about, as the higher echelons of the regime living out its last days listen to a symphony celebrating its distant victory. At least the stranger doesn't offer him sympathy, even when Boris doesn’t bother to hide the handkerchief.

“He recanted,” the stranger continues. “He learned not to say the wrong thing. Went to America to the Congress for World Peace, spoke out against formalist perversions in music. Renounced his teachers. Wrote good pieces that inspired optimism. Never let it be said that the system doesn't reward compliance."

Boris looks up sharply. Is this a threat? But then, he'd been compliant to a fault, and moreover, there's little that scares him now.

"No," he says cautiously.

“Here,” the man says, showing a spot on his chin, and mimes wiping. When Boris wipes at his chin, there’s a fresh speck of blood on his handkerchief.

The stranger sighs.

"In the last weeks, he couldn't get a thing done, you know. Not even clean after his cat. He just moped and moped, the place stinking to high heavens." Boris is briefly bewildered. Why were they talking about Shostakovich's cat? "It's a shame that the only thing he saw through to the end was that unpleasantness."

He’s not talking about Shostakovich any longer, is he? Boris recoils in disgust and horror. Even if, as he had long suspected, the higher-ups knew more than they’d let on, cornering him during a concert to pester him about the dead is beyond the pale, even for them. ( _Us _, he thinks, even for _us _, before correcting it back to _them _with some finality.)______

______“Who are you?”_ _ _ _ _ _

______“You didn’t know? Alexey Ivanovich Legasov.”_ _ _ _ _ _

______Oh. Not a threat then. The man sticks out a hand, and his handshake is firm, his palm dry and warm. Boris holds on for longer than he should have._ _ _ _ _ _

______From the way Valera spoke about apparatchiks, as well as from the vague knowledge that the man worked in Ideological Compliance, Boris expected a bony relic like the one lying in state in the Mausoleum, or maybe someone like Valery, but mellowed with age. Not a man with an outright dandyish white scarf, with an elegant walking stick. _You_ are a relic, he thinks to himself, born with the birth pangs of the new system, and now racing it to the grave, the dates on his gravestone and the chronology of the era likely to coincide._ _ _ _ _ _

______“I’m sorry,” Boris says, which sounds hollow, especially in the corridor with gilded reliefs. “I should have stopped him,” he adds, just to dispel the silence Valera left in his wake._ _ _ _ _ _

______The man lets out a good-humoured laugh._ _ _ _ _ _

______“Trust me, nobody could have. You haven’t seen him during his teenage years- Still, it’s a pity he didn’t wait for a bit longer. You know how it went in that novel: in twenty years, either the emir will be dead, or the donkey will be dead.”_ _ _ _ _ _

______“And it turned out it was neither the emir nor the donkey.”_ _ _ _ _ _

______Alexey Ivanovich shakes his head._ _ _ _ _ _

______"He never told me you were at Stalingrad."_ _ _ _ _ _

______The fact that they talked takes Boris by surprise. He assumed they didn’t, judging by how little Valera knew about the party. What did they talk about? How much did Valera tell his father?_ _ _ _ _ _

______"I never told him,” he says, and coughs to cover how shaky his voice went. “It never came up."_ _ _ _ _ _

______It startles him, how Valera, who lived on knowledge, never knew something so essential about him, and would never know._ _ _ _ _ _

______“You are a man of surprises. Speaking of, I might have a little surprise for you myself,” Alexey Ivanovich says, and reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket._ _ _ _ _ _

______A notebook, Boris thinks at first, before he realizes it’s a cassette, the number 6 written on it in familiar handwriting._ _ _ _ _ _


End file.
